Kiyoshi Matsubara (p)

Kenji Kondoh

In this paper, we attempt to show what is effective to attract more international conferences to a region, using Japanese prefectural data of 1998-2017. This article follows the methodology of Falk and Hagsten (2018), performing regression analysis on data of 943 European cities from 2012 to 2016 and showing that city size and other factors (culture, openness, etc.) work to attract international conferences. Our Poisson-regression analysis shows positive effects of the size of the economy measured by prefectural population, with prefecture/year dummies. The positive population effect is also confirmed with five-rank population categorization, and the effect gets larger as population category goes up. Other two independent variables, number of universities in a prefecture and whether a prefecture has at least one bullet-train station, has positive effects in regression with population categorization. Especially, statistical significance of the number of universities is consistent with an observation that universities are main international-conference venues in Japan.

Yasuhiro Takarada (p), Yasushi Kawabata

Kiyoshi Matsubara

Recently, countries are increasingly using regional trade agreements (RTAs), such as free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs), to cooperate on environmental issues by including environmental provisions in RTAs and harmonizing environmental regulations among member countries. Greening RTAs with regional environmental regulations prevents a country from unilaterally imposing country-specific regulations benefiting its own. However, such RTAs may harm non-member countries and hinder multilateral free trade and environmental regulations that maximize global welfare.
We examine whether countries form RTAs with regional environmental regulations and join a multilateral trade agreement (MTA) with a common environmental regulation that maximizes world welfare. Each government imposes an environmental tax to mitigate negative externalities caused by the consumption of differentiated goods. The main finding is that a deep FTA with regional harmonization of environmental taxes may act as a stumbling block for an MTA with multilateral harmonization of environmental taxes if the degree of product differentiation is intermediate. In contrast, a deep CU with a regional environmental tax serves as a building block, even if negative consumption externalities are transboundary.
This result is different from the well-known traditional result on RTAs that, given symmetry in countries, an FTA serves as a building block for multilateral free trade. The reason is that, although countries are intrinsically symmetric in our model, a deep FTA with environmental taxes causes endogenous asymmetry in environmental tax rates between member and non-member countries. This endogenous asymmetry makes participation in a deep MTA costly for a non-member because it needs to raise its environmental tax sharply to the multilateral environmental tax. Hence, a deep MTA is blocked by a non-member. This is in line with the finding that multilateral trade liberalization is not always realized between exogenously asymmetric countries.

Kenji Kondoh (p)

Yasuhiro Takarada

This study examines the effects of labor inflow into a developed country with the agritourism sector under free trade and capital movement. The country comprises two regions: an urban area where the manufacturing sector is located, and a rural area where both the agricultural and agritourism sectors are located. We assume free labor mobility between the two areas and structural, frictional unemployment in the urban area. We demonstrate that under environmentally friendly agritourism and other reasonable assumptions, additional inflow of permanent immigrants without remittance will enhance the natural environment, the rural wage rate, and domestic welfare, and will reduce the urban unemployment rate and urban–rural wage gap. However, additional inflow of cross-border commuter workers who remit all their income to the home country will not cause any changes to the economy of the host country.